“As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, ‘If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?’ It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake—but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.”

“This is one day’s observations from Himawari-8, a Japanese weather satellite, animated in a loop. It shows the western Pacific, Australia, and parts of Asia, Antarctica, and Alaska as they looked on one day in mid-2015. It covers 24 hours in 12 seconds—a time lapse factor of 7,200×.” → Glittering Blue + A New and Stunning Way to See the Whole Earth

Today from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m. it is Mole Day, commemorating ► Avogadro’s Number (6.02 x 10^23 — get it?), a basic unit of measurement in chemistry. If your chemistry skills are rusty, it’s basically this: one mole of any substance contains Avogadro’s Number of molecules or atoms of that substance. I can’t tell you how many times this tidbit has come in handy in my life. Also, today is the birthday of myself and, more importantly (literally and figuratively), my Grandma Lori…happy birthday, us!

“…a thirteen-minute movie about a young London typographer named Greenwood. Greenwood stutters, to the extent that verbal conversation is difficult. When he tries to resolve an issue with a service representative over the phone, he can’t get the words out; the operator, gruff and impatient, hangs up. When a woman approaches Greenwood on the street, he uses sign language to avoid talking. But in his thoughts, which we hear, he does not stutter. And when he chats online with a woman named Ellie he can express himself freely, and is casual, charming, and content. When Ellie writes that she’s coming to London, he panics. How he navigates her visit provides the film’s narrative and emotional suspense.”